THE ft!AN IN THE BROOKS SHIRT
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orange juice in cracked ice and corned beef hash and fish cakes. It was
as if the scenery, which had been struck the night before, had been set up
again for the matinee. The difference was that the door remained shut.
Nevertheless, though there were no onlookers, atmospheric conditions in
the compartment had changed; the relationship of the pair took on a
certain sociable formality. The little breakfast passed off like a cere–
monial feast. All primitive peoples, she thought, had known that a
cataclysmic experience, whether joyful or sad, had in the end to be liq–
uidated in an orderly meal. The banquets in Homer came to her mind, the
refreshments the Irish put out at a wake, the sweetmeats the Arabs nibble
after love, the fairy stories that end And-the-king-ordered·a-great-dinner-to–
be-served-to-all-hia-people. Upheavals of private feeling, like the one she
had just been through, were as incalculable and anti-social as death. With
a graceful inclination of her head, she
a~cepted
a second fish cake from
the waiter, and felt herself restored to the human race.
There was to be no more lovemaking, she saw, and from the moment
she felt sure of this, she began to he a little bit in love. The long day
passed as if in slow motion,. in desultory, lingering, tender talk. Dreamy
confidences were murmured, and trailed off, casual imd unemphatic, like
the dialogue in a play by Chekhov. The great desert lake out the window
disappeared and was replaced by the sage brush country, which seemed
to her a pleasant, melancholy symbol of the contemporary waste land.
The man's life lay before her; it was almost as
if
she could reach out and
touch it, poke it, explore it, shine it up, and give it back to him. The
people in it grew distinct to her, though they swam in a poeth: ambience.
She could see his first wife, an executive in her forties, good-looking, well–
turned-out, the kind of woman that eats at Longchamps or the Algonquin;
and then Leonie, finer-drawn, younger, with a certain Marie Laurencin
look that pale, pretty, neutral-colored rich women get; then herself, still
younger, still more highly organized-and all the time the man, a ludi·
crous and touching Ponce de Leon, growing helplessly older and coarser
in
inverse relation to the women he needed and wanted.
And she could see the Brussels carpet in a Philadelphia whorehouse,
where he had first had a woman, the judge's face at the divorce hearing,
the squash court at the club, the aquamarine bathtubs in his house, the
barbecue pit, the fraternity brothers, the Audubon prints in his study, the
vacuum bottle on the night table. Somehow it had become essential to
them both that she should know
everything.
They might have been col–
laborators, drawing up a dossier for a new "Babbitt.'' This is what I am, he
was saying: the wall paper in the larger guest room is a blue and white
Colonial design; I go to bed at ten and Leonie sits up and reads; I like
kippers for breakfast; we have Heppelwhite chairs in the sitting room;
the doctor is worried about my kidneys, and I feel lonely when I first
wake up.
There were the details, the realistic "touches," and then there was the
great skeleton of the story itself. In 1917 he was a chemistry major, just
